Richard Hoffman: If You See Something, Say Something
I like complaining but afterward I feel ashamed
as if I met a man who had no feet from a bomb
my country sold his enemy for export rights to
this season’s coolest sneakers.
Richard Hoffman: Nestling
One day an old painter, impatient with his failures, took a scissors to the paintings he didn’t like, cutting them into strips and putting them out with the trash.
Richard Hoffman: Looking at Photos of Gaza | November, 2024
I am no longer bewildered by cruelty,
have not been speechless facing suffering,
but I have nothing now to say to anyone
to move them to change their minds.
Richard Hoffman: Mourning Gaza
What does the pale infant turning to dust
in the gray light deep in the powdery rubble know
of the torn hands of her parents digging to find her?
Richard Hoffman: Uncle and the Donkey Cart
One day Uncle came upon a donkey and cart, driverless, stopped in the road.
Richard Hoffman: Autumn Leaves | An Improvisation after Ahmad Jamal
I know you know
as you have always known
Baron Wormser: Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays
One sentence speaks for all his direct, well-wrought sentences: “We are inside the largest militarist society the world has ever known, and we are at war always.”
Richard Hoffman: Uvalde, TX, 5/24/2022
That his dead
brother he
bringing him home.
Richard Hoffman: Refugee
A man carries his door,
the door of his house,
because when the war is over
he is going home
Richard Hoffman: The Road
the groves and orchards
poisoned, fathers and brothers tortured,
hope abandoned with the other heavy furniture
it isn’t much of a road, the future
Richard Hoffman: Summer Job
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves.
Richard Hoffman: Good Will and Salvation
hold your tongue
so nobody ever knows
or suspects your real
origins, your actual class
